Although most of the attention at NetApp’s “Data Driven” event yesterday in Boulder, CO was focused on the new HCI offering, my interest was aroused by a different announcement: NetApp is now powering an enterprise-class storage offering integrated with Microsoft Azure. In the long run, this move into the cloud might well prove more important than even a solid entrant in the hot hyperconverged infrastructure market.

I recently watched a brief talk given by Dave Hitz, a founder and Executive VP at NetApp. His particular portion didn’t get down into the weeds of what NetApp is bringing to the table with their Data Fabric or StorageGRID. There were presentations before he spoke that sated my need for technical details. Instead, Dave focused on giving a broader vision of what NetApp was trying to do. This is always a bit of a risky bet when addressing a more technically minded crowd. It’s easy to sound grandiose with your overall corporate vision, and too often these talks stray into marketing. Fortunately, Dave took the time to make it an engaging discussion.

Tech Field Day in San Jose began at the NetApp briefing center. We streamed the event live, as well as recording it for future use. For the first time, we are able to present the raw video from the Field Day immediately!

NAS just works, doesn’t it? Well no, not always. We’ve just come across a bizarre bug in OnTap 7.3.2 with CIFS running a Mac. If you rename a file and whilst doing so, change case; the file disappears.

NetApp’s unified storage platform is a compelling vision for a customer; one platform to support pretty much all your storage needs. It is a powerful sell, it is still pretty much a USP for them; everyone else has to fake it by glomming together storage products and pretending.

I’ve just come back from a NetApp training course; good course and recommended for anyone who wants to pick up some storage fundamentals, it covers all the NetApp bases and by the end of it, you should be fairly confident to do pretty much all the day-to-day routine tasks that you might be asked to do as an administrator of a NetApp array.